Accordingly, when the day came for the election of senators by the Assembly of Virginia, he just stood up in his place and named "Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson, Esquires," as the two men who ought to be elected as senators; and, furthermore, he named James Madison as the one man who ought not to be elected as senator. Whereupon the vote was taken; "and after some time," as the journal expresses it, the committee to examine the ballot-boxes "returned into the House, and reported that they had ... found a majority of votes in favor of Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson, Esquires."[409] On the 8th of December, 1788, just one month afterward, Madison himself, in a letter to Jefferson, thus alluded to the incident: "They made me a candidate for the Senate, for which I had not allotted my pretensions. The attempt was defeated by Mr. Henry, who is omnipotent in the present legislature, and who added to the expedients common on such occasions a public philippic against my federal principles."[410] Virginia's delegation in the Senate was thus made secure. How about her delegation in the lower house? That, also, was an affair to be sharply looked to. Above all things, James Madison, as the supposed foe of amendments, was to be prevented, if possible, from winning an election. Therefore the committee of the House of Delegates, which was appointed for the very purpose, among other things, of dividing the State into its ten congressional districts, so carved out those districts as to promote the election of the friends of the good cause, and especially to secure, as was hoped, the defeat of its great enemy. Of this committee Patrick Henry was not a member; but as a majority of its members were known to be his devoted followers, very naturally upon him, at the time, was laid the burden of the blame for practising this ignoble device in politics,--a device which, when introduced into Massachusetts several years afterward, also by a Revolutionary father, came to be christened with the satiric name of "gerrymandering." Surely it was a rare bit of luck, in the case of Patrick Henry, that the wits of Virginia did not anticipate the wits of Massachusetts by describing this trick as "henrymandering;" and that he thus narrowly escaped the ugly immortality of having his name handed down from age to age in the coinage of a base word which should designate a base thing,--one of the favorite, shabby manoeuvres of less scrupulous American politicians.[411]